Heavy duty sysadmin weekend. Moved my production web server over
to Apache 2. All went well except for PHP4, which needed a little
patching and to be compiled with the bundled pcre library, to avoid
segfaults caused by some bug or other. I forgot what a bear it was
to compile properly.

Also moved my mail server from exim3 to exim4. The main purpose
of this was to get SMTP-time SpamAssassin going. Everything seems to be going well there.
The Debian "conf.d" style of exim configuration makes a lot of sense
once you get over the fear of its newness.

I've been using RT to
track article lifetimes for XML.com. Overall
I'm very happy. The big shame is that to get custom reports you
really need to go right into coding, so I've got to set some time
aside to investigate that.

In other news, I'm getting a little behind on my Debian packaging work,
so I'll have to put some time aside for that this week.

Jolted by the work I've just been doing with RSS and Dashboard,
I've been looking at the RSS provided by Advogato for my diary. The idea is I
will link all the RSS files I generate from the <head> section of my
blog using the
<link rel="alternate" title="RSS" ... > mechanism, so that when browsing it
with Dashboard enabled, I get not only my personal blog, but also my Advogato
entries and O'Reilly weblog showing up too.

So, the Advogato RSS: it's a nice start, but there are one or two quirks.

The first is that the <title> element is missing. This
is a mandatory element. Obviously Advo has no concept of title in
diary elements so something like "Diary entry from edd on Mon, 16 Jun 2003"
would do. But something is needed. Secondly, all the values of the
<link> element are all the same, I suspect this is just a simple
programming error.

(Being a purist, I have longer-term misgivings about cramming escaped HTML
into the <description> field, but I am largely at war with common
[ab]usage on that one.)

Busy having too much fun to remember to write about. Recent work includes
uploading new versions of bluez-sdp, epiphany-browser to Debian. I'm insanely
obsessed with Dashboard. Splashing
around with Mono is fun, I managed to find a test case for a race condition in
the runtime the other day. It's nice that newbies like me can play.

The chump bot produces a
collaborative weblog from IRC chat. We used one of these for the WWW2003 community coverage site to
great effect -- participants could share URLs and comments relevant to the talk
in real time as with any chat, but the results are preserved in a web site.

It's my hope that anyone either finding or creating web pages relevant
to OSCON goings-on will drop into the channel and add their URLs to the
list. The site's also available for syndication via RSS.

I'm sure there will be many ways people will use web technology to cover the
conference, and there's probably not going to be "one true" IRC channel. I
offer this channel and service in the knowledge it'll be handy for me
personally, and the more people who want to contribute, the better! More
at oscon2003.xmlhack.com.

Dashboard, Mono, .NET, and PowerPC

Nat Friedman's Dashboard got me
interested in finding out more about Mono and friends. I've reported
my findings in full on this morning's weblog entries, but
here's a brief summary: Mono is cool, but doesn't work on PowerPC Linux; it's
easy to play with Dashboard, and I extended my Phone Manager GNOME applet
to send Dashboard clues; shame I can't write .NET applications in Python.

GNOME Bluetooth

I got my GNOME CVS account over the weekend, and checked libbtctl
in already. I'll be moving all of my GNOME bluetooth tools over there
shortly.

To facilitate opening up development of these tools, I created the
gnome-bluetooth mailing list.

The time has come to put GNOME Bluetooth into the
GNOME CVS. It's accumulating users now, and Red Hat are looking at packaging
it. As a result, people want changes. I can't keep up with them, so it's
time to get more folk involved. Besides, a lot of the code is quite crufty
so I need the help of others to beat it into shape. Anyway, I sent off a
request for a GNOME CVS account, so we'll see....

Behind the Times -- I've
finally bowed to pressure and started my own weblog. I had various places
where I wrote before (I've had a weblog at O'ReillyNet since 2000), but none
that I "owned." Despite my misgivings about the blogging world at large,
weblogs have undeniably become a forum for getting your opinions and ideas
heard. Various friends have reacted well to my new site, so I suppose for now
I'm doing the right thing.

I'll try hard to continue posting stuff
related to open source and hacking here, though. In that vein, a few
words about setting up my weblog. I used Zope, which I use for all of
the usefulinc.com site. There's
a neat product called BlogFace, which takes content
you already have stored and catalogued and puts a blog-like interface on top of
it. That suits me down to the ground -- I don't want to get my content locked
into only one system or presentation method. With a little hacking, BlogFace
has proved very suitable indeed.

Last week I made a nifty hack for sending email into my ZWiki installation.
I often find myself writing email with ideas I want to preserve, or point other
people to at a later date, and unfortunately you can't rely on mailing list
archives, they tend to come and go.

You can find the hack here:
EmailToZWiki. I
used the 'log' field of ZWiki to put the first 150 or so characters of
the mail -- this can then be extracted via an RSS feed, like
this one from my wiki.
(Googling for 'RSS and ZWiki' yields reasonable results for adding RSS to
ZWiki, as long as you figure out you need to Catalog-enable your ZWiki.)

I used WebDAV to get the content into my ZWiki. You need to have a trivial PUT_handler in your ZWiki to make it set the type of new documents properly. Again, Google is your friend here.